"These results provide clear evidence of a statistically and economically significant effect," said the study's co-author, Bryan Bollinger, an assistant professor of marketing at NYU.

Assistant professor of economics Kenneth Gillingham, who also co-authored the research, added that knowing more about how environmentally friendly technology diffuses amongst communities would prove useful in encouraging consumers to adopt:

"Our finding of an increasing effect of new installations in a zip code suggests that targeting marketing efforts in areas that already have some installations is a promising strategy."

Marketing "science"? Well... ok. That aside, my reaction includes both "well, duh" and also suspecting that there are other factors than the ones posited. I couldn't access the whole paper - just an abstract and (slightly amusingly) a marketing blurb about this marketing paper. But what I could read failed to mention what seemed to me like one of the more obvious influences: that zip codes with higher incidences of existing solar installations are more likely to be suitable for solar installation for any of several reasons. While lip service gets paid to "correlation does not imply causation", an awful lot of "studies" procede with such implications anyway. After all, it is a lot easier to do a study about correlation than to show causes for things.

That being said, I'm sure that seeing all the solar panels in my area had an influence on prompting me to relook at whether they would be practical for me. My 5kw system is now just over a year old. It didn't quite generate 100% of the electricity I used last year - but it came close. Might have hit the 100% if we hadn't gone on a month-long trip in the summer. The friends house-sitting for us had the air conditioner on the whole month instead of the evaporative cooler (we have both installed).

I don't think this is just a material envy issue. Some people are hesitant to be the first one on the block to put up solar panels because some residents find them ugly, and they dont' want to be "that guy" who's blighting the neighborhood. Once a few people have panels up, the social barriers to entry are lower.

I expect to be the first one in my area to put them up, but we're still a couple of years away until photovoltaic efficiency and return on investment are where I need to take the plunge.

My parents have photo-voltaic cells, a dozen of them, of the use-yourself-feed-excess-to-grid variety.

In the first month of operation, they made my parents £80. And it wasn't a particularly sunny month.

My parents neighbours expressed an interest, but the husband being one of the arrogant types went out and bought the first thing that said "solar cell" on it.

Apparently he never stopped to wonder why he was connecting them to the water pipes not the power cables. But hey! They have completely free hot water now. Well, if by hot, you will also accept luke-warm, or tepid, as definitions of hot...

My parents have photo-voltaic cells, a dozen of them, of the use-yourself-feed-excess-to-grid variety.

In the first month of operation, they made my parents £80. And it wasn't a particularly sunny month.

My parents neighbours expressed an interest, but the husband being one of the arrogant types went out and bought the first thing that said "solar cell" on it.

Apparently he never stopped to wonder why he was connecting them to the water pipes not the power cables. But hey! They have completely free hot water now. Well, if by hot, you will also accept luke-warm, or tepid, as definitions of hot...

The really unfortunate thing about this is every word is true

Gotta love having everyone else subsidise you right? Not to mention that you can pretend that you are doing something for the environment.

Hint: You are not and your neighbour is correct, good solar collectors are much better environmental move than solar cells.

Why is it whenever solar panels are discussed, people usually think of solar electricity? Solar heat is much more viable. It's cheaper, captures much more energy per square foot of panel, and pays back the investment much faster. The technology is mature and much more efficient. Even low tech systems work well and pay for themselves quickly at todays energy prices. Using solar energy for heat will save a lot more fossil fuel and do more to reduce CO² emissions than solar electricity ever will.

I have a small solar greenhouse that was built almost 30 years ago. Based on records of average sunshine hours for the area, the heat collected is equivalent to 150 gallons of heating oil. That's about $600/year at current prices in this area, which is one of the worst areas in the country for solar heat. When I built the greenhouse, heating oil was under a dollar per gallon. At those prices, it took about 4 years to break even.

About 20 years ago, I worked for a company that installed solar heating on private homes. It was a direct heat system, no storage, installed on the south walls of homes. At our latitude, vertical panels are quite efficient. Quite often, we installed in the same neighborhoods and on the same streets we'd been on before. One family would install panels. The others followed suit. It wasn't a matter of doing it because the neighbors did. It was knowing someone who tried solar heat and saw the reduction in their heat bills.

And you are harming the environment due to solar panel manufacturing and disposal. They are made with various toxic chemicals including silicon. The process involves the production of greenhouse gases and they are frequently not disposed of properly, polluting groundwater. Even when they are, it involves the transportation of the heavy panels over many miles (as during the installation process), further polluting the atmosphere.

Adoption of any new technology is slow until it is able to scale to the point where it becomes more cost-competitive. That's why solar panels should be subsidised - in the short-term, at least - by governments.

The subsidies could be paid for by ring-fencing carbon taxes. I.e. protecting revenue raised from taxes on undesirable, carbon-burning activities and requiring that it be re-invested in creating alternatives to what is being taxed.

After all, redirecting the free-markets away from undesirable behaviours and towards desirable ones is exactly the reason for having a government in the first place.

And you are harming the environment due to solar panel manufacturing and disposal. They are made with various toxic chemicals including silicon. The process involves the production of greenhouse gases and they are frequently not disposed of properly, polluting groundwater. Even when they are, it involves the transportation of the heavy panels over many miles (as during the installation process), further polluting the atmosphere.

So go Green. Don't get solar panels.

That's one of the differences between solar electricity and solar heat. At northern latitudes where solar heat makes the most sense, the panels can be on the walls, not the roof. They can be built out of much cheaper, more durable, and more environmentally friendly materials. The outer glazing on mine are recycled tempered glass from patio doors. I paid $10 each for them. In 30 years, none have been broken, although they have been hit hard by some large tree branches. The total cost of my passive system including the initial construction, maintenance, and a rebuild of all the wood components (didn't use treated lumber the first time) has been under $1000. That averages to $35/year.

Panels for solar heat can be built on site and integrated into new construction or added onto existing structures. The most toxic components are the caulks and sealants used in their construction or the treated lumber, which lasts a very long time. Except for the ability to handle glass, no special skills are needed.

Solar heat is completely practical. Solar electricity is feasible but not practical. IMO, the emphasis on solar electricity as opposed to solar energy in general comes from those looking to profit from it and from utilities who want to make sure that they're kept in the picture. Alternate energy jobs don't have to be factories turning out premade panels. They can be contractors building durable and environmentally friendly units into and onto the structures themselves.

You don't see solar panels in use, so you're unwilling to take a risk on something you're not personally familiar with. Your neighbors get some panels, use 'em for a few months, and then you have a basis for making your own decision about them.

This is not a new idea.

herbalist wrote:

vertical2010 wrote:

...So go Green. Don't get solar panels.

...Solar heat is completely practical. Solar electricity is feasible but not practical. ...

I've seen some successful solar water and air heating installations using mostly recycled materials. One particularly successful set used tin cans spraypainted black in a wood box with a plexiglass overlay for air, and some similar setup I don't remember for water. Probably PEX or PVC instead of cans.

And you are harming the environment due to solar panel manufacturing and disposal. They are made with various toxic chemicals including silicon. The process involves the production of greenhouse gases and they are frequently not disposed of properly, polluting groundwater. Even when they are, it involves the transportation of the heavy panels over many miles (as during the installation process), further polluting the atmosphere.

So go Green. Don't get solar panels.

That's one of the differences between solar electricity and solar heat. At northern latitudes where solar heat makes the most sense, the panels can be on the walls, not the roof. They can be built out of much cheaper, more durable, and more environmentally friendly materials. The outer glazing on mine are recycled tempered glass from patio doors. I paid $10 each for them. In 30 years, none have been broken, although they have been hit hard by some large tree branches. The total cost of my passive system including the initial construction, maintenance, and a rebuild of all the wood components (didn't use treated lumber the first time) has been under $1000. That averages to $35/year.

Panels for solar heat can be built on site and integrated into new construction or added onto existing structures. The most toxic components are the caulks and sealants used in their construction or the treated lumber, which lasts a very long time. Except for the ability to handle glass, no special skills are needed.

Solar heat is completely practical. Solar electricity is feasible but not practical. IMO, the emphasis on solar electricity as opposed to solar energy in general comes from those looking to profit from it and from utilities who want to make sure that they're kept in the picture. Alternate energy jobs don't have to be factories turning out premade panels. They can be contractors building durable and environmentally friendly units into and onto the structures themselves.

You touched upon it. Solar friendly new construction (remember that housing boom several years back). The other thing not mentioned is that one can take the output of solar heat and convert it to electricity if needed. Storing heat is easier, cheaper, and safer than electricity. Heat can even be used to cool.

It's a lot like satellite dishes when I were a kid (ee by gum!) when they were rare to start with, and got to the point everyone had them. I remember stopping at the Dixons on Liverpool Lord street (opposite the British Home Stores and the entrance to the Matthew Street) and seeing hte 12" TV they had playing the Astra test signal. Then for the next year or two it was 'count the dishes',with separate counts for sky and BSB 'squariels', which mainly went in pairs.

I think the main factor is not so much 'how well do they work', but 'how well do they work 'HERE'. Everyone's afraid there's some reason stuff won't work too well, that won't be found out until you've paid your money and installed it. In this case 'oh your roof isn't the right angle' or 'it's going to take $4000 more to install because of how your roof is done'. Or just 'your weather doesn't really suit this technology'. I was under the impression that where I live had no OTA television reception. Neighbours just moved in next door and have a big directional one on a 30ft pole, and they get TV fine. So I started looking into it. Seems I have more signals than I did in my last place, where I could pick up some signals with a set-top antenna and a booster.

But it's the worries about the specifics being a barrier to entry that dissuade people and it's exactly what the study found. That people are more likely to adopt a technology if they know it works for 'people just like us'.

And yes, it seems obvious, and 'what everyone knows'. However, until 'what everyone knows' is tested, it's just apocryphal, and a good bit of folk-hokem. It needs that veneer of respectability of a study to prove it's not just coincidence, and incidentally, persuade groups like the government to encourage neighborhood 'pioneers'.

I have a solar array on my roof. Being an Electrical Engineer, I understand the obvious benefits from them, especially since I have a lot of electricity-hungry devices in my house like multiple computers and a 80-gallon planted aquarium and I live in a very sunny area of Northern California that gets hot during the summer. For me it isn't a pure replacement, just an augment since I could only put 4.3kW on my roof due to fire code and available space. My power bill went from over $1,600 a year down to $400. The roof-mount panel system I initially bought will pay for itself in about 4 more years, with a guaranteed panel output of 90% of their rated capacity for another 19 years. This is a straight-up hedge bet on future power rate hikes, and I'm even better prepared now since I added a cheap ground-mount 1.7kW secondary array in my back yard with used panels I picked up from someone else for a 1/3 the cost of new (set mine up with Enphase microinverters too - which are awesome I might add).

I moved into a good neighborhood where a fair amount of the owners are now getting older with their kids in high school of college and quite a few have paid off their homes. Only one other neighbor has put on panels in the three years since I initially had mine installed, so I don't think this article's premise of a trend is correct for at least my city in California. I have seen a LOT more commercial installations (tops of commercial buildings, parking lot arrays, a massive solar farm on top of relatively unusable land, etc) that have been of course federally subsidized, but these installations are helping with the overall peak-time usage demand during the day, especially during the summer when the sun is brightest and it's the hottest here.

I've looked at thermal solar systems in the past and they generally aren't as viable for my house as a photovoltaic panel system is, especially since my house is heated by relatively cheap natural gas and is much more thermally efficient since I replaced my old windows.

I've seen some successful solar water and air heating installations using mostly recycled materials. One particularly successful set used tin cans spraypainted black in a wood box with a plexiglass overlay for air, and some similar setup I don't remember for water. Probably PEX or PVC instead of cans.

I've seen similar ideas that used black painted window screen in a wall mounted box with a glass cover. If the heated air is ducted into an insulated box filled with rock, it's cheap heat storage. Put an old hot water tank in that box with the outer cover and insulation removed. Feed its output into the existing hot water tanks inlet and you have a solar preheater for your hot water. The possibilities are endless, and cheap.

A really simple design for solar cooling is a solar chimney. This can be as simple as a black painted exhaust duct in a glass box. The sun heats the pipe which heats the air inside the pipe, which then rises out. Run an air intake duct underground so the air passing through it is cooled to ground temperature before going into the structure. When the sun shines, it's almost like free air conditioning with no moving parts.

it involves the transportation of the heavy panels over many miles (as during the installation process), further polluting the atmosphere.

That list bit is true for everything we produce. Unless we completely move to a carbon-free energy generation world, it will continue to be true. That's not reason enough to avoid solar panels though because they they result in fewer carbon emissions over their lifespan in-spite of fossil fuels being involved in their production and transportation.

And everything else you said can also be applied to lots of things. Like your car. It pollutes when moving your ass from A to B. And cars can be damaged by tree branches, hail, high winds, sandstorms, heavy snow, falling ice, baseballs, footballs, soccer balls, golf balls, other cars, pillars, keys, the neighborhood kids... ad nauseum.

Average cost to repair them... usually in the hundreds of dollars, if not more.

We still buy cars though... because they are useful inspite of their shortcomings. Why treat PV panels any differently?

I've seen some successful solar water and air heating installations using mostly recycled materials. One particularly successful set used tin cans spraypainted black in a wood box with a plexiglass overlay for air, and some similar setup I don't remember for water. Probably PEX or PVC instead of cans.

I've seen similar ideas that used black painted window screen in a wall mounted box with a glass cover. If the heated air is ducted into an insulated box filled with rock, it's cheap heat storage. Put an old hot water tank in that box with the outer cover and insulation removed. Feed its output into the existing hot water tanks inlet and you have a solar preheater for your hot water. The possibilities are endless, and cheap.

A really simple design for solar cooling is a solar chimney. This can be as simple as a black painted exhaust duct in a glass box. The sun heats the pipe which heats the air inside the pipe, which then rises out. Run an air intake duct underground so the air passing through it is cooled to ground temperature before going into the structure. When the sun shines, it's almost like free air conditioning with no moving parts.

That's a pretty old technique; the Babylonians or Persians did something similar. They'd put an intake on one side of a building down to a qanat, a solar chimney on the other side of the building, and the air getting heated in the chimney would pull cooled air from inside the qanat; kind of a passive swamp cooler.

I've done some research because I'd like to build a (mostly) off the grid cabin for getting away and unwinding. Might build the living quarters out of a shipping container so I'll have an excuse for not getting phone calls. "You called? I don't get signal inside the cabin. The steel box is a Faraday cage, you know."

We had an "energy audit" performed by a fellow who owns a company that sells and installs residential panels. (You'd think he might have a "conflict of interest" in the audit, but wait...) As it turned out, he was also teaching a class on energy audits at the time, so a "course final" included ours. Free to us. He determined that our energy use is so low, it wouldn't be worth our while to install solar panels. Yes, he said, we could "sell" excess power (easy to achieve here in the sunny desert southwest) back to the power company. But at the puny payoff the power company gives, it'd take an unreasonable amount of time to achieve ROI. Point is, do your research. Solar panels might be right for you, or maybe not.

I got Solar Panels.., but I wish I didn't id really rather have the money ive spent on them

There is allot of adults in the house, during the day, which would be the best time for them to make money (got in before the govt cut the tariff.) Over a 3 month period I would get back maybe half of one monthly payment

Can anyone comment on the solar panels' value on national security? It seems to my that by distributing power generation to innumerable (albeit relatively small) points we add fault tolerance to our energy supply.

My parents have photo-voltaic cells, a dozen of them, of the use-yourself-feed-excess-to-grid variety.

In the first month of operation, they made my parents £80. And it wasn't a particularly sunny month.

My parents neighbours expressed an interest, but the husband being one of the arrogant types went out and bought the first thing that said "solar cell" on it.

Apparently he never stopped to wonder why he was connecting them to the water pipes not the power cables. But hey! They have completely free hot water now. Well, if by hot, you will also accept luke-warm, or tepid, as definitions of hot...

The really unfortunate thing about this is every word is true

Gotta love having everyone else subsidise you right? Not to mention that you can pretend that you are doing something for the environment.

Hint: You are not and your neighbour is correct, good solar collectors are much better environmental move than solar cells.

I don't get your point? Who is subsidising who here? My parents didn't buy the cells with subsidies (because they stopped that scheme, they're on hire-purchase) and ... I'm not entirely sure how you imply any other form of subsidy. I'm not making money from it, my parents are. My parents who live in a different county. Don't make presumptions like that, because you sound like a dick.

And regardless of how good the collector is, when you live in the wilds of northumberland and you decide to power your hot water from two 3x6' panels on your east-facing roof, you're never going to have a hot bath again. In the middle of September, their water topped a whopping 23ºC at 1.30pm.

I would say it is a little bit different from that. Sometimes when your neighbor has a nice car they appear to be showing off or wasting money.

Solar panels, on the other hand, fall into the category of items with a functional or even monetary benefit rather than purely a status symbol. My guess is that when a neighbor sees other neighbors doing things that may have a long term benefit they tend to think it could be good for them as well. Then the next thought is "if my neighbor can manage it, I should be able to manage it as well".

My guess is that smart phones fall into the same functional category also. Fun to have, but also more functional than a plain phone.

Can anyone comment on the solar panels' value on national security? It seems to my that by distributing power generation to innumerable (albeit relatively small) points we add fault tolerance to our energy supply.

I don't see solar panels having any real ability to compensate for the loss or disruption of more conventional sources of power, not on a direct basis. If those same solar panels were used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and that hydrogen was stored as fuel to drive larger generators, then they could offset the loss of a conventional power source, at least for a short time. Individually, power from solar, wind, tidal power. etc are too erratic. Combined together, their output becomes more consistent and more inline with demand. Days with strong available sunlight are often calm or with light winds. Windy days often accompany storms when solar isn't viable. When an energy storage such as hydrogen is added to the equation, all of them become more viable.

A more reliable and disruption resistant system would be to use the output from solar, wind, water, and more conventional sources to create hydrogen. This could be piped and stored when production exceeds demand. When production drops or is disrupted, the stored hydrogen could be used to produce electric. In such a system, everyone is a consumer and everyone can be a producer, a true cooperative. The problem here is that big energy (coal, oil, gas) would fight such a system tooth and nail.

As mentioned by other posters, I would adopt solar, but the cost and subsequent ROI just isn't worth it. By the time I would pay it off (I've gone through extensive calcs), I would almost need to replace it.

an increase of just 10 solar panel installations in a zip code was accompanied by 7.8 percent increase in the probability of adoption by others.

Is a misleading extrapolation from the paper, where the abstract says:

Quote:

an additional installation increases the probability of an adoption in the zip code by 0.78 percentage points

The multiplication to consider 10 adoptions is one thing (and you'd have to look more carefully to figure out if you are extrapolating out of sample), but the outcome is not exactly "adoption by others" it is "an adoption".

That is, you'd be more accurate if you said "an increase of just 10 solar panel installations in a zip code was accompanied by 7.8 percent increase in the probability of an adoption in that zip code."

[…]I expect to be the first one in my area to put them up, but we're still a couple of years away until photovoltaic efficiency and return on investment are where I need to take the plunge.

That's what I have been mulling over the past couple years too, cost and electrical efficiency. My main PC alone runs two 1200 Watt PSUs, come to that a 16,000 BTU air-conditioner In my office/tech room (2. Floor in my house, directly underneath the roof, facing south and west side, so nasty summer sun burning on me) I burn through quite some electricity.

Adoption of any new technology is slow until it is able to scale to the point where it becomes more cost-competitive. That's why solar panels should be subsidised - in the short-term, at least - by governments.

The subsidies could be paid for by ring-fencing carbon taxes. I.e. protecting revenue raised from taxes on undesirable, carbon-burning activities and requiring that it be re-invested in creating alternatives to what is being taxed.

After all, redirecting the free-markets away from undesirable behaviours and towards desirable ones is exactly the reason for having a government in the first place.

Nooooo, the reason for a government to exist is to enforce laws and protect peoples rights and freedoms, not tax specific groups more and favor other groups. The fact is that more private energy companies(i.e. oil companies, electric companies, etc) are investing in newer cleaner and cheaper technologies(i.e. solar, wind. hydrogen, nuclear, thorium, etc) because they will become the standard in the future, and the sooner they get in on the ground floor, the more they benefit, that's the nature of the free-market. Government involvement isn't necessary, and I would say, shouldn't happen. Also, I'm not sure how government involvement in the free-market is a free-market.

Nooooo, the reason for a government to exist is to enforce laws and protect peoples rights and freedoms, not tax specific groups more and favor other groups. The fact is that more private energy companies(i.e. oil companies, electric companies, etc) are investing in newer cleaner and cheaper technologies(i.e. solar, wind. hydrogen, nuclear, thorium, etc) because they will become the standard in the future, and the sooner they get in on the ground floor, the more they benefit, that's the nature of the free-market. Government involvement isn't necessary, and I would say, shouldn't happen. Also, I'm not sure how government involvement in the free-market is a free-market.

My parents neighbours expressed an interest, but the husband being one of the arrogant types went out and bought the first thing that said "solar cell" on it.

Apparently he never stopped to wonder why he was connecting them to the water pipes not the power cables. But hey! They have completely free hot water now. Well, if by hot, you will also accept luke-warm, or tepid, as definitions of hot...

The really unfortunate thing about this is every word is true

The unfortunate thing is none of your criticism of solar hot water heater is true. They can heat water far beyond scalding every darn day of the year. Mine uses about $10 of backup electricity a year on those really cloudy weeks. On a $ per CO2 saved basis they are miles ahead of photovoltaics .

Nooooo, the reason for a government to exist is to enforce laws and protect peoples rights and freedoms, not tax specific groups more and favor other groups. The fact is that more private energy companies(i.e. oil companies, electric companies, etc) are investing in newer cleaner and cheaper technologies(i.e. solar, wind. hydrogen, nuclear, thorium, etc) because they will become the standard in the future, and the sooner they get in on the ground floor, the more they benefit, that's the nature of the free-market. Government involvement isn't necessary, and I would say, shouldn't happen. Also, I'm not sure how government involvement in the free-market is a free-market.

You seem to be rather missing my point (and the answer is slightly off-topic, for which I apologise). The free-market, while a most effective mechanism most of the time, is not 100% perfect. There are situations where the costs of a behaviour are not directly fed back into the system, and so negative behaviour is not naturally corrected.

Climate change and carbon emissions are a great example of that. Costs of carbon-emitting behaviour will be borne not by the emitter, nor even by the contemporaries of the emitter, but by generations yet unborn.

In these situations, governments need to be a bit more subtle than just "enforcing laws and protecting rights". They effectively need to 'tweak' the pressures that market forces are exerting in order to ensure that the free-markets work to the maximum benefit of everyone.

I've been debating politics now for some thirty-plus years, and as time has passed I have become more and more aware that there are no single solutions that work for all scenarios. Hard and fast rules, like ones that a government should stick to laws and leave social policy to markets and individuals, just don't work all the time.

The world, and our society, need solutions that are way more nuanced than that.

PS: The free-market, as you describe it, is in my opinion an oxymoron. You can either have a freely competitive market with lots of competing companies, or you can have an unregulated market with one or two effective monopolies. The natural state of an unregulated market is to tend to a monopoly, because economies of scale make larger companies so much more efficient. Computers have made this tendency worse, as large companies can now obsessively drill into and find their areas of inefficiency.

I.e. Freely competitive markets only exist, in the sense that we know them, because of government restraints. In this sense it's a lot like a garden. If you want a diverse and interesting garden with lots of different plants, you need to keep the weeds at bay. If you leave nature to take its course, one or two species will monopolise your garden with all the other plants being restricted to one or two niches. As a consumer, this is not what you want (in either the garden or the market!).